The Extroverted Introvert brings you life musings to ponder while you shower – it's that simple

You of All People Don’t Know How to Articulate!

If you knew me personally you’d know how funny that was to hear. I’m the literary one of my group – I was the voracious reader throughout school, studied English at uni, won too many writing competitions to remember and I’m making it my career.

But I find it so hard to articulate ‘me.’ I can write characters to engage and excite and I can write for corporate. Ask me to give a presentation to a stadium filled with people and I hit my stride. Ask me how my day was and I lose 99% of that vocabulary; ‘yea my day was good thanks, how was yours?’

My day wasn’t good thanks. It was shit. There was so much that overwhelmed me I had to step away from my desk because if I did break down and cry, it couldn’t be in front of everybody. I couldn’t come back from that if it happened in front of everybody.

I’m an emotional introvert and the best listener. If you need a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, you come to me. I will listen to your problem and say all the right things to make you feel better. But you’ll never be able to do the same for me. I prefer to swallow my own pain and self doubt and inner turmoil and push it deep down until I forget about it or I have a melt down, let it out and start again.

Ask anyone and their go to adjective to describe me is ‘happy’ with second place going to ‘bubbly.’ If only they knew the half of it. It’s not that I’m trying to hide who I am or how I’m feeling or anything, I just hate confrontation and tough emotional situations. But that links back to childhood and I don’t have room to go into that here.

Self destructive isn’t it. It doesn’t cover it or do me justice. Hiding emotions is a coping mechanism that you use once, then twice and the effects build until you realise never speaking up and letting your voice be heard is crippling you.

I’m not broken, I just haven’t put all the pieces of me back together yet. But the greatest thing I did was to realise I had to change and let people in – little by little, bit by bit.

So the next time you ask me how my day was? I’m going to tell you ‘it was shit.’ And then you need to bear with me while I find all the words to articulate why and prop me up while I stumble through it.

If my life was plotted on a graph, 2017 would be the point at which it started to make a sharp turn up and imagining that graph refuels me.

I’m looking forward to sharing with you. It seems to be helping.

Now, because this post just seems to be a little too much on the sombre side, here’s a side note – binge watching Billions is a perfectly acceptable way to waste a Saturday in contemplation.